Greetings, have any of you used as trading arcade recently or much in the past. Can you recommend any good company with a London footprint.
Plus what are the pros and cons in practice.
If you need to increase available funding, Ropunzel, I wouldn’t think an arcade is going to be the answer (and especially not for spot forex). They’re absolutely fraught with difficulties, problems, strings and catches.
Have you looked at TopStepTrader?
You can trade remotely for them - no need to be in Chicago. They fund accounts up to an equivalent of $150,000 (after you pass their “Combine” - but if one can’t pass a Combine, one probably wouldn’t want to be trying to trade for a living anyway?), and the trader gets 80% of the profits. You have to stick to some “safe trading” parameters (“loss limits”) that they impose for their capital protection, naturally, but you’d want to do the same with your own money, too.
They’ve already funded over 300 traders this year - it seems to work for many people. There are plenty of YouTube videos where TST-funded traders discuss the whole process.
They’re also well-known, well-established, highly ethical, honest and straightforward ([I][U]unlike[/U][/I] some of their competitors, NB!) and have a very clean reputation in the industry.
You’d have to trade forex [I]futures[/I] rather than [I]spot[/I] forex, but it’s the same thing (I can tell you, having traded both - they’re about 99.9% correlated, thanks to all the HFT’s, but with “volume” available for futures.)
Maybe worth a look?
This looks really good, I’m just going through their website now but I must say your recommendation gives me some assurance. I was initially just thinking more about being in a trading floor environment where I could piggy back some of the verifiable good traders and generally up my game with a little competition.
what is the time frame for the $150K profit target? Can you supplement your funded account with your own money and if so what would be the profit share and max loss parameters; I suppose these are all questions to ask them. What is the motivation for funding your account - they looking for trading talent from unconventional sources to get behind?
I like the fact that they straight-Jacket you into some basic risk management rules. That takes some of the pressure of the trading discipline element. Will investigate further.
I ought to say that I’m not, myself, TST-funded, but over the last few years I’ve known a few people who were. I wish they’d existed, back when I started, though - I would have been “straight in”, there.
I hear you …
Well, they have a thing called “squawk radio” which I think attempts, in a “remote” context, to be a substitute for that. But I’ve never listened to it, myself.
They’re not really “trading teachers”, just “account funders”, for people who can demonstrate to them that they understand risk-management and can stick to their (very sensible) rules. They’re much more concerned about that than about profit.
There isn’t one. You can take as long as you want, to pass a Combine (but - if not doing it within a month - will have to pay the fee each month, as there are data costs etc. involved from TST’s perspective: futures charts for live trading are not free, and TST have to pay exchange-fees, data-fees and so on, so Combines aren’t free to try. Also they have to pay their rent and staff, I suppose).
For the $150,000 Combine, you have to make a profit (however long it takes) of $9,000 on their demo, with a daily loss limit of $3,000 and a trailing maximum permitted drawdown of $4,500.
To me, it seems highly debatable whether the $150,000 account is actually “better” than qualifying initially for a $50,000 account (the parameters for that one are: again no time-limit; profit target $3,000, daily loss limit $1,000, trailing maximum permitted drawdown $2,000).
If you qualify for one of their $50,000 funded accounts, start trading that and make some profits with it, they quickly increase your “maximum permitted lots to be traded” up to the level of someone who has qualified for a $150,000 account anyway. As your account grows, your “lots permitted” and daily loss limit do increase. I’d think that for most people the $50,000 Combine, rather than the $150,000, is probably the one to try.
I believe [I]not[/I], actually. I think that if you’re TST-funded, they expect you to trade [I]just[/I] their account for 1 year. On whatever days you choose to trade, that is - there are no obligations to trade when you don’t want to, at all. (But you wouldn’t mind doing that, keeping 100% of the first $5,000 and 80% of all other profits, with no risk of contributing towards any losses? 
).
I think so. With their “Combine” structure, they’ve developed a good way of identifying “safe traders” to back. As long as people stick to the loss limits and maximum permitted position-sizes, and don’t hold positions overnight, they don’t mind how you trade: that’s your business. And they’re happy to collect their 20% of the profit from a large number of people. Their “capital risk” isn’t [B]really[/B] the $50,000/$150,000 referred to, of course, because of the loss limits, so it’s a good deal from their perspective, too.
In effect, you’re getting the [U]position-sizing facility[/U] of a much larger account than you could have on your own, without needing the capital. But if you overrun the daily loss limit or the max drawdown, they’ll very quickly say “Thanks but no thanks”!
Like any investor, their primary concern is for the safety of their own capital. Hence the emphasis is very much on risk-management rather than profit maximisation. (That’s very much true of my own trading, with my own money, too! ).
By the way, (like any investor, I imagine) they don’t allow “trading the news”.
There are certain scheduled announcements/fundamentals, for which it wouldn’t be possible to be confident of not overrunning a daily loss limit, and for that reason they require their traders to be flat for a couple of minutes before such announcements and a few minutes after them, as well.
There’s a list on their website.